The field of the invention is methods and machinery for processing and handling dough balls, and particularly dough balls used for production of tortillas.
Tortillas have traditionally been made by hand. However, this is a highly labor intensive operation unsuitable for large volume commercial production. In automated commercial production of tortillas, the ball of dough which ultimately forms the tortilla is positioned on a flat conveyor belt. This individual positioning is also labor intensive, and because of the higher speeds needed for high volume production, hand placing dough balls does not always provide uniform spacing. Consequently, when the dough balls are pressed flat, they may overlap, forming a "figure-8", which must be rejected as waste.
To better facilitate automated production of tortillas, various machines have been proposed and used. See for example, U.S. Pat. No. Re. 34,530, incorporated herein by reference. While the machine described in this patent, for example, has performed well in the past, disadvantages remain in consistently placing and pressing dough balls. In the machine shown in U.S. Pat. No. Re. 34,530, occasionally, when the slide plate lifts up, a dough ball will roll out of position, resulting in waste. Accordingly, there is a need for an improved machine for handling dough balls.